Rosalea Barker: 20 Feet from Reality: An eyewitness account

20 Feet from Reality: An eyewitness
account

by Rosalea BarkerJuly 10,
2013

On Friday, July 12, the movie
Fruitvale Station will open in Oakland and other
“select” cities in the United States. If you follow
their Twitter feed @fruitvalemovie you’ll get some idea
of the buzz surrounding the film, which is based on the true
story of the shooting of an unarmed young man while he was
lying face down on the platform at Fruitvale BART station in
the early hours of New Years Day, 2009. I wrote about the
incident at the time, here. I can’t wait to see the
movie.

Sadly, I no longer have to wait—as if I ever was
waiting for such a thing—to see the reality of a transit
cop beating up on a young man as he lays face down on the
ground.

::Some context::

On July 4, at about 9pm,
I was waiting for the #1 bus at the Uptown Transit Center in
Oakland. The UTC is basically just a short stretch of 20th
Street between Broadway and Telegraph Avenue with bus stops
for several key routes. It was quiet now, but all week the
media had been congregating on that city block because it is
where long lines of commuters who needed to get across the
Bay to their jobs in San Francisco were forming. Since
midnight on June 30, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train
operators and other union members had refused to go to work
because their contracts had expired and BART management’s
offers for the new contracts were a long way distant from
what the unions wanted.

Although the transbay buses were
the focus of media attention, the hundreds of thousands of
workers who use BART to commute entirely on the East Bay
lines were also forced to either take their car or hop on
the AC Transit buses whose routes roughly parallel the BART
corridor—the #1 line being one of them. Bus drivers—who
also might have walked off the job on July 1 because their
contracts also expired—were working long hours, dealing
with jam-packed busloads of disgruntled former BART
riders.

AC Transit is the commuter bus service that serves
Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Unlike BART, it doesn’t
employ its own police officers, but instead relies on
sheriff’s deputies from the two counties to take care of
any disturbances on the buses. And the deputies can call for
backup from the police forces in the cities the line passes
through.

The #1 is somewhat prone to disturbances of the
kind I wrote about here in 2009 (but on a different bus
route). A couple of weeks ago, for example, a passenger on
the 1 kept yelling “Joe Frasier! Joe Frasier!” for the
entire time I was on it, despite another passenger trying to
engage him in a conversation in order to calm him down. If
it weren’t for the underlying tragedy of California’s
failed mental healthcare system, such incidents would be
comical. In fact, some people do think it’s comical to egg
other passengers on, as I was about to find out that July 4
evening.

::What I heard::

It’s a nice warm
evening—the week of the BART strike coincided with a heat
wave—and someone has lit a fizzy firework on the sidewalk
diagonally opposite where I’m waiting for the bus. Two
young women, dressed for a party, are singing in two-part
harmony while they wait for the same bus as me. It feels
festive, like an Independence Day should. A young man
bludges a cigarette, and at first I give him my SternFace
look—as I have been trained to do by my neighbors, who are
concerned that I’m far too blasé in my interactions with
strangers—and then cough up, so to speak, with a
smile.

The bus arrives and isn’t too crowded, so I find
my favorite seating spot is empty. It’s the last seat in
the front half of the concertina double-length bus and faces
the passengers who are sitting in the back half, facing
forwards. The two young women sit in the seats at the front
of the back section, still singing and laughing, which
attracts the attention of two young men seated further back.
A family, consisting of a father, mother, two young sons
with their skateboards, and their even younger daughter
still wearing her bicycle helmet, sit in the other seats
surrounding the concertina part of the bus. They talk
happily among themselves in what I guess to be a
Scandinavian language.

The two young men, I notice before
I turn my attention to playing Klondike on my phone, move
forward so one of them is sitting directly behind the two
young women (who stop their singing) and the other is
sitting across the aisle from him and them. It’s a night
out on the town, after all; time for young blades to try
some chatting up. I tune it all out and get on with my card
game.

At some point in the journey along Telegraph Avenue,
I become aware that a person who has just boarded at the
front of the bus is yelling. The bus driver is asking him to
either calm down or get back off. The passenger replies that
he’ll be quiet, but one of the two young blades eggs him
on for his own amusement. Nonetheless, the unruly new
entrant quiets down and I expect the bus to pull out from
this stop and move on. It doesn’t.

I’m hungry, and the
bus is stopped outside a burger joint. Not wanting to wait
until a sheriff’s deputy turns up to deal with the
situation—which seems like a non-situation to me—I
decide to go and get some dinner and then catch the next
bus.

::What I saw::

To my surprise, when I turn
around and face the front of the bus in order to exit, I see
that the cussing has not been coming from the mouth of a
“Joe Frasier!” or “Open my meds for me!” older,
destitute, and disturbed person, but a rather nattily
dressed young man, somewhat disheveled as if he’d been
drinking too much. He is sitting quietly—so quietly that I
have second thoughts about getting off because surely the
driver is going to drive on now that things have calmed
down.

But I figure that once the driver has called in the
authorities, he’s probably obliged to wait there until
they come, so I saunter over to the burger bar, and eat my
dinner seated inside watching the reflections of fireworks
exploding on the diner windows. I can’t see what’s going
on outside, so when I exit the restaurant and see all the
people waiting there at the bus stop I’m flummoxed. It’s
the same bus still sitting there, only now all the
passengers except the loudmouth are out on the lawn in front
of the burger joint.

Young loudmouth wants to get off, but
the bus driver tells him to stay inside. It seems like the
driver has picked up that one of the two young blades is
deliberately annoying the “troublemaker” and he is
keeping them apart. I sigh, and go and stand about 20 feet
away to have a smoke and look at email. Surely another bus
will arrive soon, so we can all get on with our journey, but
it is a holiday, after all, so the buses are running less
frequently.

As the sheriff’s deputy pulls up behind the
#1 bus and further out from the curb than the bus is, I look
up and see that Loudmouth has gotten off the bus and Young
Blade has approached him and is getting in his face. What
the sheriff’s deputy sees when he exits the patrol car and
rounds the back of the bus is a young black man with
dreadlocks fighting with a young Asian guy. The deputy races
up and grabs Loudmouth, spins him round and slams him down
on the ground, putting his knee on his back. Loudmouth
struggles. Perhaps he says something. The deputy punches him
in the face, and Loudmouth manages to twist around and punch
the deputy back.

The deputy knees him in the side and puts
his full weight, via his left knee in Loudmouth’s back, on
him. Loudmouth’s left leg begins to jerk uncontrollably as
if he’s having an epileptic fit, but still he struggles.
Young Blade is yelling at the deputy, “Just cuff him! Just
cuff him!” and other passengers are yelling at the deputy
to stop being so violent. This continues for some time and
is still going on when the next bus finally arrives at
approximately the same time as several Oakland Police
Department squad cars and an AC Transit supervisor.

We are
hustled onto the other bus, but there’s a delay getting
going because we’re blocked in by an OPD patrol car and
because the bike rack on this second bus is already full and
the Scandinavian family also has bikes, which have to be
taken off our original bus and brought inside the second
one. So we hear the pop of the deputy’s taser as he still
struggles with Loudmouth, before we are hurried from the
scene.

::WTF?!::

Until he assaulted the deputy in
response to his initial rough handling, Loudmouth was just
that—an intoxicated loudmouth on a bus. No big deal,
especially not since he had calmed down as requested by the
driver, and seemed more bewildered than belligerent when he
was asking if he could get off the bus like all the other
passengers.

But consider this: the bus operator calls in
a disturbance on his bus, the sheriff’s deputy and the OPD
respond, and all the witnesses to what transpired beforehand
are sent from the scene. There is no public record of this
incident, as far as I can see from searching for crime
reports on the AC Transit, OPD, and Alameda County
Sheriff’s websites.

Just another unreported incident
involving a young black male caught up in a web of
assumptions. What can you do?

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